Columnist.
Many of our friends continue to register shock at the election returns of last month. How can it be?, they ask. It's not so hard to figure out, we reply. The first Romney bumper sticker that appeared last year bore a startling resemblance to another famous corporate logo. What were they thinking? The first bumper sticker for the President's re-election said simply: "ObamaCares." Brilliant. We are not saying that President Obama *does* actually care about "people like me." But voters polled on that question chose Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by a whopping 81-18 margin. That's fatal in politics.
Liberal Washington Post editorial page commentator Ruth Marcus sees sexism in the Republican opposition to naming the current U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, as Hillary Clinton's replacement as Secretary of State. Marcus trots out a well-worn story from the 1970s. She relates the formidable Alice Rivlin's recollections as first Director of the Congressional Budget Office. "Over my dead body will we have a woman in that job" was the reaction of the House Budget Committee Chairman. ... Conveniently overlooked by Ruth Marcus as well in this latest attempt to gin up a phony war on women is the fact ... that the first woman to be confirmed as Secretary of State was Madeleine Albright. Sec. Albright sailed through in 1996 on a vote of 99-0 in a Senate controlled by Republicans.
Don't Ratify the UN Disabilities Treaty
Pete Wehner is a real gentleman. His reproofs are generally not caustic and are almost always intended to have his opponents listen to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." Thus, when he recently criticized Kirsten Powers, he provided a most useful sketch of the history of Arab-Israeli conflicts in recent times, at least since 1967. Wehner's column should be required reading for anyone taking part in Mideast policy discussions. In the main, we agree with his assessment of this good woman's errors. But in gently rebuking Kirsten Powers, and, Pete Wehner compounds the errors of the past 24 years of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
It seems every time the Republicans lose a presidential election, white board-toting architects and backroom strategists descend on the Sunday talk shows. Republicans must dump the social issues. Defending the right to life of unborn children and upholding the civil right of marriage is just costing too much support with the voters. We have to *moderate* our positions, they say. It's as if the Second Officer on the *Titanic* were to run down six flights of stairs and yell at the grimy, coal dust covered sweating stokers shoveling coal in the engine rooms: *This is all your fault!* What we saw on Election Day was a strong turnout among Evangelicals and Catholics for Mitt Romney. Evangelicals backed the former governor even more strongly than his fellow Mormons did. Catholics who attend Mass regularly were also strong backers of the GOP nominee.
Congressman Ron Paul has just delivered his valedictory address in the House of Representatives. And he has told TV interviewers that the American Revolution was a wonderful example of *secession*. He's a much better OB/GYN, I'm sure, than he is a student of America's history. He could be cited for political malpractice. If the Founding Fathers and the Patriots who fought and won the Revolution were seceding, why is it that none of them ever called it secession? They certainly had the word back then. They invoked the well-known right of revolution. They had read their John Locke and their Montesquieu, to be sure, but they most often listened to sermons advocating independence -- especially those of the New England clergy.
With no time to recover from a thorough election day whooping, Republicans in a lame duck Congress are facing an even worse budgetary nightmare than last year. And they only have two months to negotiate a solution with President Obama. Last time, as the Chair of the Balanced Budget Amendment campaign, fellow conservatives and I were urging Republicans to tie the unavoidable increase in the debt ceiling to a balanced budget amendment. Because it also prohibited tax increases, the amendment would have required balance to be achieved through necessary cuts throughout the federal government. But in the end, politicians did what you might expect: They punted the issue. And America will now face serious consequences.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his fourth term, Kansas editor William Allen White, a staunch Republican, wrote: "We who hate your gaudy guts salute you." President Obama: We have never hated your gaudy guts. And we acknowledge that a majority of our fellow citizens of this Great Republic have saluted you and conferred upon you for the second time the office of President of the United States. We thank God that more than 120 million Americans voted in a peaceful and orderly election. That alone is a wonder of the world. (You will pardon us, Sir, if we also thank Heaven for the Twenty-second Amendment, another legacy from FDR.)
The nineteenth century French painting, Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, today hangs in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. It has not lost its capacity to shock. In the Roman Circus, the small flock of Christians is huddled in the sand, kneeling around their aged pastor. We see weeping little children, whole families gathered. In the stands are tens of thousands of people, none of whose faces are visible, but they are colorfully dressed, awaiting a special entertainment. The scene is eerily lighted by flaming crosses. Looking more closely, however, we see those crosses bear Christians, covered in pitch and set aflame. Their suffering, at least, will be brief. Out of the depths beneath the Circus stride lions a single tiger. The lead lion advances menacingly toward the Believers.
We have just observed the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that two-week nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy showed a steely resolve. He was determined not to permit the USSR to move Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles within ninety miles of our shores. This would derange the whole balance of the East-West conflict, Kennedy believed. What Winston Churchill called "a balance of terror" depended on the forces of freedom not giving in under threat of violence and intimidation from the Kremlin and its Communist cats' paws throughout the world. President Kennedy's Secretary of State Dean Rusk described the denouement of the great power march to the brink of nuclear holocaust. Rusk said: "We were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked." Indeed he did blink. Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was unwilling to fight World War III over his uncovered plot to put offensive missiles in Communist Cuba. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was enraged.
You must ask yourself this: Why *would* Bill Clinton want Barack Obama to be re-elected? In 2008, candidate Obama consigned the Clinton Presidency to oblivion when he said it was not like the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, said Obama then, was a transformational president. Even more insulting to the Clinton legacy, Obama compared his two terms in the White House to the truncated two terms of Richard Nixon. Can there be any graver offense against a McGovern Democrat than that? President Obama won a convincing 53% victory in 2008. He is now running for his political life, but it cannot be said that he ducked the tough issues. He fought for and pushed through Congress his takeover of the nation's health care. That's why it's called Obamacare and not Hillarycare.
Bing West's column on National Review Online is hard reading. It is must reading for every American. We are more than a month into one of the worst foreign policy debacles in our history. Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were brutally murdered in the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. That consulate *is* American sovereign territory. It is as if the Libyans came across the border into San Antonio and killed American citizens on American soil. In fact, when the Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa came across the border into New Mexico in 1916 and killed fourteen U.S. soldiers and ten American civilians, President Woodrow Wilson took action. In an election year, no U.S. President could be seen doing nothing when violent mobs screaming "Death to Americans" shooting, killing, looting, and setting fire to our property.
After nearly a month of cringing and getting lost in their own contradictions, the Obama administration is finally clinging to an elliptical mention by the president of "acts of terror" that he claims won't deter us from doing whatever we are supposed to do in the Mideast. What *was* it we were supposed to be doing over there? Oh, supporting democracy, of course. But democracy in a country where "freedom fighters" roar into town shooting their rifles in the air is going to be hard to achieve. All those celebratory bullets have a nasty way of coming down again. And they can hit local voters as they are lining up to cast their ballots.
As presidential debaters clash over the meaning of a Rose Garden general reference to "acts of terror," and whether that phrase was applied to the murder of our ambassador to Libya and three of his colleagues, and with a debate moderator throwing a "life line" to one of the candidates, it's interesting to note something *else* said in the secure environs of the White House complex the bright morning after that night of flame and death in Benghazi. It's almost like Poe's short story, *The Purloined Letter*. The critical evidence is in plain sight. The day after the murders of the Americans, President Obama promised to cooperate with our presumed friends in the new Libyan regime in Tripoli.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stepped forward to say she accepts responsibility for the fact that our consulate in Benghazi was refused enhanced security. This is another example of her willingness to take one for the team. But what does it mean? Will she "accept responsibility" by resigning her office? This is what is meant by accepting responsibility in most parliamentary democracies. As Secretary of State, she surely knows that any of her NATO colleagues who accepted responsibility for such a debacle would immediately surrender his office.
During last week's vice presidential debate, the candidates clashed over whose team would be better able to impose "crippling" sanctions on Iran. The problem of sanctions is an old one. President Jefferson tried to impose a trade embargo on Britain in 1807 to stop the Royal Navy from seizing our sailors on the high seas. This Embargo was an attempt to use peaceful coercion to bring about a change in policy by the British. It failed. It was Jefferson's greatest failure as president. We have a Bicentennial Walking Tour of the War of 1812 at the U.S. Naval Academy. I'd be happy to take you on that tour. The War of 1812 was the direct result of the failure of Jefferson's *sanctions* to make Britain changer her behavior.
You could not have a better example of moral equivalence than a column written by Steve Clemons in The Atlantic Magazine's online version. Clemons reviews the always interesting history of President Harry Truman's bold decision in 1948 to defy the State Department -- and especially his hand-picked Sec. of State, Gen. George C. Marshall. Truman had said that Gen. Marshall was the greatest living American. He said that, perhaps to the irritation of his running mate, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the largely unknown Missouri senator was thrust onto the ticket in 1944. FDR may have had his own ideas as to who was the greatest living American.
A liberal reporter speaking at a conference in Georgetown recently dismissed conservative alarms about the Obama administration's mandate that forces religious institutions -- like Catholic Hospitals and Evangelical colleges -- to provide coverage for drugs and procedures that can abortions and that effect sterilizations. "What about the anti-Catholic Bible riots in Philadelphia in the 1840s," she asked. Those led to scores of people actually being killed. Those Bible riots were deplorable, a blot on American history. But they were not the acts of the federal government. They were lawless violence, not a deliberate policy of oppression.
You know that Gov. Romney won Wednesday night's rumble in the Rockies. That's because Al Gore was out quick blaming the president's lackluster performance on -- what else? -- climate change. And if you have any doubts who won, you have only to consult MSNBC's Amen Corner. Chris Matthews normally feels a tingle go up his leg when President Obama speaks. Last night, he felt something else go down his leg. Fortunately, it didn't show. But the lamentations on the left were loud. MSNBC's panel sounded like the Wailing Wall. Well, at least they got that much of Jerusalem right.
It is beyond reason. The inmates clearly have control of the asylum. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rant before the UN General Assembly in New York this week would better have been delivered in Stockholm. The famous Stockholm Syndrome was named for the way some hostages began to identify with their terrorist captors. It was offered as a psychological disorder. In New York, at the UN, this psychological *disorder* is the new order of business. Ahmadinejad called for a new world order. Of what? A rule of a UN world body dominated -- or at least held hostage by -- the Terroristans that make up an increasing number of the members of the General Assembly.
